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"What Restaurants Now Know About You" by Susan Craig for the New York Times


Waitman

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I've experienced this first-hand. We had dinner at Eleven Madison Park last year. Mid-way through the meal we asked our server, 'How is it that you know so much about us, given that we've never been here before?" The server explained that the restaurant Googles all of its customers. That kind of creeped me out. Despite that, we loved our entire experience there.

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This is not a new thing. OpenTable has had this capability since 1999. The one acronym they left out was PITA. :-)

This type of label is funny, of course, until it gets out which restaurants are using it, at which point diners will probably want to know so they can base their own decisions. Was it Citronelle, Mark? Ray's The Steaks?

My advice as a consultant to restaurants is to have your employees sign strongly-worded non-disclosure agreements, covering everything under the sun, but certainly including things such as this.

If I ever found out that a restaurant - any restaurant - had me in their system as a "PITA," there would be hell to pay. I'm not saying there shouldn't be internal notation warning the staff of a chronically difficult customer, but . the . customer. had . better . not . find . out . about . it. Anyone disagree?

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This type of label is funny, of course, until it gets out which restaurants are using it, at which point diners will probably want to know so they can base their own decisions. Was it Citronelle, Mark? Ray's The Steaks?

I've heard of it being used before, just generally, as regards Open Table and other record-keeping. I wouldn't assume it's any particular restaurant or not any particular restaurant but more of a common practice.

When I first saw that NYTimes article, the thing that jumped out to me is how they have to work hard at not revealing too much of what they know, for fear of creeping people out. It reminds me of years ago when the capability was developed for phones to display the numbers of incoming calls. Big businesses were using it early on, so they knew your phone number when you called, but they would ask you for your phone number anyway because they didn't want you to know they had your phone number.

(EMP googling its customers is in a different league, though. That would make me way more uncomfortable than a place having information based on my past visits.)

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(EMP googling its customers is in a different league, though. That would make me way more uncomfortable than a place having information based on my past visits.)

Does Googling people even really work most of the time? I mean, sure, if I Google Don Rockwell, I'm going to get a pretty clear-cut idea of who he is. But I can't find ME anywhere--at least for the first 30 pages, after which I get bored and stop looking. Unless I include my employer, but even then it only returns photo credits. Am I doing it wrong?

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Does Googling people even really work most of the time? I mean, sure, if I Google Don Rockwell, I'm going to get a pretty clear-cut idea of who he is. But I can't find ME anywhere--at least for the first 30 pages, after which I get bored and stop looking. Unless I include my employer, but even then it only returns photo credits. Am I doing it wrong?

Based just on a name--especially a fairly common one--it wouldn't necessarily return the most useful information. People making a reservation, though, are also giving a contact phone number and possibly an email address as well. That would narrow down results. If the phone number is a landline, it makes it easy to know where people live. With a cell phone, it's slightly less accurate, as someone may move from the area where they got the number to another region and keep the number.

Something like LinkedIn gives a decent amount of information about people and comes up in a google search, and "googling" may also mean following up leads that come from Facebook hits. In addition, people sometimes use some variant of the name in their email addresses as a user name for messages boards, twitter, etc.

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Does Googling people even really work most of the time? I mean, sure, if I Google Don Rockwell, I'm going to get a pretty clear-cut idea of who he is. But I can't find ME anywhere--at least for the first 30 pages, after which I get bored and stop looking. Unless I include my employer, but even then it only returns photo credits. Am I doing it wrong?

If you have a somewhat unique first or last name its pretty shocking what you can find if you add a single word like a town or company. In the first few pages of mine you can find out all sorts of things, including grade school (!) awards/accomplishments. The internet never forgets.

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Restaurants in New York know everything about you.

Anyone in DC going this far?

At what point does gathering information become compulsive spying?

or

Is it that we're all so boring an predictable? Or just that restaurants want to condition us to become that way?

Not sure which restaurants may be doing this in DC, but...

None of the above on the other questions.

With razor-thin profit margins, a highly-tailored customer experience can mean the difference between life through loyal customers or death by inability to surprise and delight.

It's no secret that Las Vegas hotel casinos are astoundingly masterful, probably best in the world, with manipulating customer data mines to "automagically" enhance the customer experience. Order a burger with extra onions at one of the big hotels? It will come to that way to you every time, without asking, and most likely without you noticing. It's the not noticing part that's key. The more you note and expect such "rewards", the more you become a card-carrying entitlement demander; the magic becomes just another transaction. It's a careful dance of managing expectations, coupled with good ol' B.F. Skinner intermittent reinforcement mechanisms, powerful stuff for influencing consumer behavior.

What creeps me out is not so much that my data may be flying around, it's the business model of "stealth surprise and delight". I'd rather full disclosure on the wooing, please.

But casinos rocked the model, restaurants may be next, and why not. It helps the bottom line by driving brand loyalty. I'd probably do it if I were them.

*shiver*

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Does Googling people even really work most of the time? I mean, sure, if I Google Don Rockwell, I'm going to get a pretty clear-cut idea of who he is. But I can't find ME anywhere--at least for the first 30 pages, after which I get bored and stop looking. Unless I include my employer, but even then it only returns photo credits. Am I doing it wrong?

I am literally the only person on the globe that I know of with my name, so you can find out a lot about me. If you have a more popular name then it will rate results, or you may have a smaller online footprint, which I think is good!

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This is the kind of thing that makes me wary about posting anything at all online, although everything I post is quite innocuous, guess I'm just paranoid. But I totally understand businesses trying to use the info that they gather about their customers to their advantage....

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This is the kind of thing that makes me wary about posting anything at all online, although everything I post is quite innocuous, guess I'm just paranoid.

I'm thinking the opposite: I should be posting everything under my full name in hopes that Googling restaurateurs would discover my tendency to mouth off on-line and ply me with extra courses, fine liquors and comely servers.

I also think that this is as much about making life easy for the restaurant as it is about taking care of the customer -- the flip side of anticipating your every need is knowing in advance what the customer is going to get -- if your favorite drink is already on the way as you sit down you're less likely to throw off the service by asking for something exotic and new. They are training you to get into a comfy little rut, because it makes their life easier.

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